The Eighth Annual North Carolina Colloquium in Medieval and Early ModernStudies will be held at Duke University on February 16-17, 2007. Thisyear's graduate student colloquium encourages interdisciplinary discussionof our topic, "Dissent and Dissonance," among scholars of the Middle Agesand early modernity. We will convene to explore the contours of resistanceto religious, political, cultural, aesthetic, and institutional traditionsand discourses in premodern or early modern contexts, negotiating the veryterms of order and dissent. We solicit papers that interpret resistancenot by reducing analysis to all-encompassing categories of "orthodox" and"heterodox," but by considering the varieties and gradations of dissent anddiscord available to medieval and early modern traditions and institutions.

Paper topics might address, but are not limited to, the following:

-What constitutes an establishment or an institution? Are these active,static or otherwise?

-What constitutes orthodoxy? What is its relationship to dissent? How dothese terms influence one another in medieval and early modern contexts?

-Does order/orthodoxy ever (or always) bear the traces of dissent?

-How do the very terms "dissent" and "orthodoxy" naturalize particularcultural, political or periodic understandings of regimes of order anddisorder?

-How might we think about the performance of dissent in architecture,images, mode of dress, actions, language, or social/political practice?

-How does dissonance relate to the impetus to revision (aesthetic andmusical revisions of harmonics/harmony; social and/or political revisionproceeding from discord)?

Please submit paper proposals (250 words max) with full name andinstitution to medren_at_duke.edu by December 1, 2006.